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Asian stocks were mostly higher on Friday ahead of a U.S. government jobs report, after Wall Street rose on Thursday and broke its first three-day losing streak since Halloween.
U.S. futures were lower and oil prices rose more than $1.
In Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 index fell 1.8% to 32,254.82 as investors speculated that the Bank of Japan could end its negative interest rate policy.
Ahead of Thursday's meeting with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, BOJ Governor Kazuo Ueda told parliament that the central bank would face an “even more difficult” situation at the end of the year and early 2024. On Friday, the US dollar fell from 144.12 to 143.79 Japanese yen. By mid-November the price was trading above 150 yen.
Updated data released on Friday showed Japan's economy contracted 2.9% year-on-year in the July-September quarter, worse than previously estimated.
Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index rose 0.3% to 16,394.90 and the Shanghai Composite Index rose 0.4% to 2,977.83. The Kospi in Seoul rose 1% to 2,519.07. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 rose 0.2% to 7190.70. India's Sensex gained 0.4% and Bangkok's SET gained 0.2%.
On Thursday, the S&P 500 rose 0.8% to 4,585.59. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 0.2% to 36,117.38 and the Nasdaq Composite jumped 1.4% to 14,339.99.
Big tech stocks helped push the market higher, led by a 5.3% rise in Google parent Alphabet. They are Wall Street's most influential stocks due to their massive size and have posted big losses so far this year.
Cerevel Therapeutics also rose 11.4% after AbbVie announced an $8.7 billion deal to buy the company and its pipeline of candidates for schizophrenia, Parkinson's and other diseases. AbbVie rose 1.1%.
Wall Street rose to its best level since March 2022, largely on hopes that the Federal Reserve will finally finish raising interest rates to control high inflation. Investors are eagerly awaiting Friday's US jobs report.
The Federal Reserve wants the job market to slow at just the right amount. Too much weakness would mean putting people out of work and a possible recession, but too much strength could lead to upward pressure on inflation.
A report Thursday said slightly more U.S. workers filed for unemployment benefits last week, although the number was not worryingly high and was exactly in line with economists' expectations.
Hopes for lower interest rates help all types of investments, especially those that are considered the most expensive or most promising in the future. That's helped Big Tech stocks post huge gains this year.
Alphabet's jump on Thursday brought its year-to-date gain to just over 55%. On Wednesday, the company announced the launch of its artificial intelligence model, Gemini. Alphabet was the single biggest force pushing the S&P 500 higher, but Apple, Amazon and Nvidia all rose at least 1%.
Another winner was JetBlue Airways, which rose 15.2% after it said it may report better-than-expected results for the final three months of the year. The company also slightly lowered the high end of its forecast for fuel costs through the end of 2023.
On Wall Street's losing side, C3.ai slumped 10.8% after reporting weaker sales than analysts expected for the latest quarter.
Crude oil prices have fallen recently amid concerns that global demand could fall short of available supplies. But on Friday they reversed their decline. The price of a barrel of benchmark U.S. crude rose $1.00 to $70.34. It lost 4 cents to close at $69.34 on Thursday. Brent crude, the international standard, rose $1.15 to $75.20 a barrel.
The euro slipped from $1.0793 to $1.0787.
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` business reporter Stan Choe contributed.
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